For Djokovic, Recovery Is the Routine

Novak Djokovic celebrates after winning his quarter-final match against Tomas Berdych at the Australian Open on Tuesday.

Pool photo by Scott Barbour

By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

January 22, 2013

MELBOURNE — When it comes to recovery, all tennis stars are clearly not equal.

On Monday, Gilles Simon took to the court at the Australian Open after a marathon in the previous round and could not muster the energy, the precision or the belief to avoid a mismatch in his fourth-round encounter with Andy Murray.

On Tuesday, Novak Djokovic, the world’s No.1 player, took to the court after a marathon in his previous round and looked every bit the part of a smooth-moving champion against Tomas Berdych.

“It all depends, of course, from the players and their respected routines that they do after the matches,” Djokovic explained after his 6-1, 4-6, 6-1, 6-4 victory had put him back in the semifinals in Melbourne.

“We have certain kinds of things that we do,” he said of his team. “It has been working in the past. It worked well this time also.”

Djokovic, who will next face the fourth-seeded David Ferrer of Spain, acknowledged that ice baths were part of his approach but declined to give more details of his team’s methods in order to preserve any advantage he might retain. But the remarkable performance Tuesday was only the latest reminder of how much progress he has made since his early years on tour when staying power was an issue.

Last year, after a brutal semifinal victory over Murray, he bounced back with one day’s rest to beat Rafael Nadal in nearly six hours in the final.

This year, he played for 5 hours 2 minutes against Stanislas Wawrinka in the fourth round on Sunday night before winning, 12-10, in the fifth set. After his recovery work, he said, he went to bed at 5 a.m. on Monday and did not wake up until 2:30 p.m.

By Tuesday evening, he was back to chasing down all the thunderbolts that the powerful Berdych could hurl at him, winning the first set in brilliant fashion and then bouncing back quickly from the loss of the second to win in precisely half the time needed for the victory over Wawrinka: 2 hours 31 minutes.

Berdych had not lost a set in this tournament and is still riding high after leading the Czech Republic to a Davis Cup title last November; just as Djokovic was riding high in 2011 after leading Serbia to its first Davis Cup title the previous year.

But Djokovic’s consistency, agility and signature ability to turn defense into offense were again simply too much for the fifth-seeded Berdych, who, despite all his controlled aggression, has now lost to him 12 times in 13 matches.

Asked if he was surprised how well Djokovic recovered from the Wawrinka match, Berdych shook his head.

“I would say, for Stan we would probably see it would affect him,” he said of Wawrinka. “But definitely not for Novak. I mean, he’s probably the fittest guy on the tour right now.”

A reporter then asked Djokovic if he could, as a sports fan, understand how the public might be surprised by his powers of recovery.

“I mean the people who don’t know tennis, who have never been in those kinds of situations would not truly understand what the player has to go through, not just when you prepare for a Grand Slam but also during a Grand Slam,” Djokovic said. “After five hours of match, you need to really put a lot of time into recovery, different kinds of recoveries.

“As I said, I understand that many people have many different views and opinions, and I respect that. But I’m doing everything that is legal, that is correct, that is natural that I can, possibly can, in my power. And it’s working well.”

There is increasing discussion within the game about whether playing best-of-five sets in the Grand Slam tournaments and Davis Cup is the right idea in this era, whether it does not put too much pressure on the players physically and psychologically.

But for now tradition prevails, and Ferrer and his Spanish compatriot Nicolás Almagro used the full allotment of sets in the day’s first men’s quarterfinal in Rod Laver Arena.

“Each match is its own world,” Ferrer said afterward, sounding more fatalistic than triumphant.

But whatever the world, Ferrer always finds a way to defeat Almagro.

For nearly three sets, it appeared that Almagro — 0-12 against Ferrer before Tuesday — would finally prevail. Quick to the ball and just as quick to punish it, he was dictating terms to Ferrer, a man who usually takes dictation, crumples it up and turns it into another grinding rally.

But the 10th-seeded Almagro, with his barrel chest and live arm, was making nothing but flashy progress with his machismo-infused forehand and single-handed backhand. Even the ball off his strings sounded livelier on this sun-kissed Melbourne afternoon.

And then he made the mistake of serving for the match.

It did not go well as the precision and newfound sense of manifest destiny suddenly turned shaky, and Ferrer broke back from 4-5 to 5-all, soon taking the third set and the momentum.

Knowing Ferrer’s doggedness (he has trademarked the word) and Almagro’s scar tissue, it was easy to imagine that Almagro would not get another chance to serve for the semifinals. But he was not done flirting with a breakthrough.

With Ferrer barking at himself and swiping at a water bottle with his racket on a changeover, Almagro would serve twice more for the match and falter in the fourth set: at 5-4 and 6-5.

By now it was clear to everyone involved that this was Ferrer’s match to lose. It was also clear — adding injury to insult — that Almagro had a leg problem.

The denouement came as no surprise as Ferrer won the tiebreaker and then closed out the match with a decided absence of delight, 4-6, 4-6, 7-5, 7-6 (4), 6-2.

“Well, it was a miracle I won this match,” Ferrer told Jim Courier, the American tennis champion turned analyst, in an on-court television interview.

Courier said on Tuesday that he would have loved to see thought balloons over the players’ heads. The contents might not have been suitable for commercial television in Almagro’s case, but he made a poignant gesture late in the final set, tapping the seated Ferrer gently on the leg with his racket as he trudged out to the baseline to play out the string.

“Everybody knows, and it’s not new: David Ferrer is No.4 because he gives nothing away,” Almagro said. “I think he was a fair winner. I had my chances and could not take advantage.”

There were no such dramatic reversals of fortune in the women’s quarterfinals on Tuesday as Li Na, the Chinese star, defeated Agnieszka Radwanska of Poland, 7-5, 6-3, and Maria Sharapova, the Russian with the American accent, defeated Ekaterina Makarova, a Russian with a Russian accent, 6-2, 6-2.

That qualified as a nail-biter for the second-seeded Sharapova in this tournament. She has dropped just nine games in her winner-strewn, hopes-dashed path to the semifinals. But Li, who will turn 31 next month and likes nothing better than plenty of pace on the baseline, is likely to provide stiffer resistance.

Almagro said he injured his leg on a return with Ferrer serving at 3-all in third set, which affected his ability to push off on his serve and groundstrokes. That could explain some of his difficulties but Ferrer’s unbeaten record against him surely explains plenty more.

“I don’t want to think it’s a mentality problem,” Almagro said. “If I have a mentality problem, I think I didn’t win the first two sets.”

Ferrer is still in the hunt at the tournament where Nadal, Spain’s biggest tennis star, won in 2009 and lost in that epic final last year to Djokovic. To Ferrer’s credit, he already has been a Grand Slam semifinalist four times in this hyper-competitive era.

But there was more than a hint of weariness in his tennis on Tuesday, perhaps the effect of his prodigious efforts last year, when he won seven tournaments and yet — in a sign of how tough it is at the top — still did not improve his ranking.

Win or lose from here, he will rise from No.5 to at least No.4 on Monday, and win or lose from here, he will still be ranked No.1 in self-deprecation.